An Unlikely Path

How did an artist and activist fresh out of college wind up opening a vegetarian restaurant and community center just up the street from H.H. the Dalai Lama, and how did that funky little café in the Himalayan foothills spawn a charitable organization working for sustainable living and cross-cultural collaboration across the globe?

In 1994, I set out with a couple of friends on what was meant to be a year-long, round-the-world journey. We wanted to see who lives on planet earth, learn about what it means to be human, and try to make a difference along the way. Something happened halfway around the globe, however, that stopped us in our tracks: a ten-day discourse from the Dalai Lama on the Path of the Bodhisattva — the life of the engaged contemplative who dedicates herself to the altruistic intention to realize her full potential in order support others to do the same.

It was a life-changer. Everything we were looking for was here, we reasoned, so why go any further? We tore up our onward tickets and set ourselves on the cushion, and also started asking around about volunteer work. If we were going to be here for a while, how could we make ourselves useful?

No adequate caption for this experience…

One thing leads to another (even more fortuitously than average in Dharamshala) and, in the summer of 1995, I had the great blessing of my first private meeting with His Holiness, in which he very generously advised me on the vision that would become the Earthville Network and a full-time adventure for the next seventeen years (and counting) of my life, laying the groundwork for a global network of local initiatives for a more compassionate and sustainable world.

There was some context for this: In 1992, as a senior in college, I had spent a semester in Nepal, living with a materially poor (but joy-rich) family in their one-room mud house just below the Tibetan border. I was profoundly inspired by the extraordinary wisdom, resourcefulness, and kindness of the peoples of the Himalayas, yet also alarmed by the destructive impact of unplanned and unsustainable “development” in the region. Recognizing that change is inevitable but can be shaped to some degree for the better, and aspiring to help build bridges of understanding, appreciation, and altruistic collaboration across cultures, I began organizing a global community of kindred spirits committed to developing and promoting holistic and replicable solutions for compassionate living and sustainable development, starting locally and networking internationally.

A Café in the Clouds & a Vortex of Virtue

In 1997, my friends (Scarth Locke and Dara Ackerman) and I, in partnership with local collaborators, opened the doors of the first Earthville project, the Dharamshala Earthville Institute (DEVI) and KhanaNirvana Community Café, in McLeodGanj, the exile home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in Exile. Providing jobs, training, and language education for recently arrived Tibetan refugees, we cooked up tasty, all-natural vegetarian cuisine from around the world and served it to a colorful international crowd of seekers. We channeled the modest proceeds into efforts (our own and others’) to develop educational and community building programs in Dharamshala, such as computer training for Tibetan refugees and vaccinations for local street dogs.

Documentary Night at KhanaNirvana/DEVI

At KhanaNirvana/DEVI, we held weekly talks from former Tibetan prisoners of consciences (many of whom had been imprisoned and tortured brutally for “crimes” such as saying the name of the Dalai Lama or having his photograph). We showed documentary films on Tibet, Buddhism, India, and other topics of regional or spiritual interest. And we had lively open mic nights with music and poetry of every description. And, in the midst of this, the best part happened: connections. KN/DEVI became a fertile nexus for fruitful meetings, recruiting new volunteers for local NGOs, matchmaking our diverse visitors’ gifts with the local students or agencies who could benefit from them, collecting blankets and medicines for our friends with leprosy, and endless streams of other good things.

DEVI was intended as a first step – a staging ground for launching other activities that would gradually flesh out the larger Earthville vision. This expansion happened quite naturally, as many altruistically oriented people from around the world who passed through Dharamshala made connections at DEVI, which naturally led to friendships that evolved into partnerships and projects.

One of the first such friends was Azriel Cohen (who recently passed away, in October 2012, and is pictured in the center of the photo at the top of this page, immediately to the right of the Dalai Lama). Azriel came from an orthodox Jewish background and had traveled far, both geographically and psychologically, to discover for himself why so many Jews had been drawn to India. At the trailhead of his journey, he read The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz’s fascinating and penetrating account of the first historic meetings between a delegation of Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama (and, through that lens, the human search for deeper connection). Following that trail led Azriel to DEVI and to us, and we began organizing Jewish, Buddhist, Jewish-Buddhist, and Interfaith programs that eventually came full circle by bringing Rodger back to Dharamshala as a guest educator and facilitator in our passover program. This truly unique seder and month-long interfaith program was attended by several hundred people from every imaginable background, all coming together first in curiosity, then in compassion, and gradually in burgeoning love.

The Next Level: Dharmalaya

The newly-sprouting Dharmalaya campus

Fast-forward a decade. Having handed DEVI and KhanaNirvana over to our very capable Tibetan refugee staff, I moved two hours to the east to the village of Bir, a small and yet-unspoiled settlement of a few hundred Indian families and one of the earliest Tibetan refugee colonies in India. There, we receive a warm local welcome to establish the next step in the Earthville vision: a rural eco-campus for sustainable and compassionate living. With the generous support of Didi Contractor, one of the most preeminent vernacular architects in northern India, and an enthusiastic crew of local labourers keen to learn the dying arts of the traditional eco-building styles of the region, we set about creating the Dharmalaya Institute for Compassionate Living.

Before the first building of the Dharmalaya campus was even half-finished, we held our first “integration retreat,” a ten-day program organized in collaboration with our friends from SanghaSeva, which combined meditation in the mornings and evenings with mindful and joyful volunteer work in the afternoons. Participants made mud bricks with the locals, and then learned to build adobe walls. Organic gardening and permaculture landscaping were among the other “work meditations” on offer. The goal of these programs is threefold:

To provide a vehicle to help us take the warmth from the meditation cushion or the yoga mat and apply it in our work and social lives;

To create a model of immersive, contemplative ecotourism that allows visitors to break through the tourist bubble and have authentic and meaningful contact with the good peoples of the Himalayas; and

To establish a local green economy that creates fairly-compensated employment for low-income villagers and especially to create empowering opportunities for women of so-called “low caste.”

At the end of a happy work retreat

Since then, we’ve done two more similar retreat programs and the experiences of both the locals and the international participants in these programs have been life-changing in many cases. Considering that we haven’t even officially opened yet, we imagine this bodes well for the future.

Once the building is complete and the Dharmalaya Institute opens to the public, we will host a variety of service-learning programs in various aspects of sustainable and compassionate living, including classes, workshops, and retreats. We’re already running a weekly meditation group (seasonally). We hope to carry forward the magic of the interfaith programs that began in Dharamshala, and take them even deeper in a beautiful natural setting where our guests and volunteers can stay a while and find their own ways to plug into this dynamic mix of social and ecological learning and service in a contemplative environment.

Help Us Launch this Innovative Campus

Raising the Roof

In the last four years, we’ve launched a innovative NGO, raised around $80,000, created green jobs for dozens of Himalayan villagers, hosted over a hundred volunteers from India and over 25 other countries, completed about 90% of the beautiful new adobe-and-bamboo building that will serve as the HQ of our eco-campus, and changed a few lives along the way.

Once the doors of the Institute open to guests, the project will have a steady steam of income to sustain itself, but we need public support to make the last step to reach that point.

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After the intensity of our inner and outer experiences of recent weeks, my friend Artyom and i were ready for a holiday. We hired a jeep to Sikkim, had good talks and good momos, and then he caught a jeep eastward to Rumtek Monastery (the exile HQ of the previous Karmapa, though the Indian government still won’t allow the current incarnation to take his seat there, or even visit, for fear that China would be none too pleased) and i caught a series of local share jeeps northwest to Ravangla, one of several towns in a breathtaking cluster of centuries-old mountaintop settlements worthy of the mythic moniker of “Shangri-la.”

After a magical, nearly dead-silent day of rest and reflection in a cabin on a hill above Ravangla, near Kewzing, i hitched a ride onward to Gyelzing with some grad students from Gangtok who were conducting a state-sponsored survey of all of Sikkim’s schools to assess their material needs so the state government can fulfill them. Just like that. This many pens, that many books, here ya go. (Wow. I thought India was supposed to be a “poor” country and the US was supposed to be a “rich” one, so why do so many of my teacher friends in Oakland have to buy their own chalk out of pocket?) The inquisitive students asked me, “What is the greatest problem facing America right now?” I answered right away, “George Bush,” which earned me a high five from Manu, the Poli Sci major in the passenger seat. (No offense intended to anyone who might feel aligned with him; i’m not a partisan, but i do place a higher value the lives of others and healthy international relations than this president has demonstrated, and i do view his actions as a grave threat to the peace and prosperity of the US and the world.) After giving it moment’s thought, though, i nominated another candidate: “selfishness.”

Speaking of Dubya, he just arrived in India for his first-ever visit to the subcontinent, in search of a face-saving way for the figureheads of both countries to gain domestic and international political capital by coming to an “agreement” about the nookyaler plans that India will pursue whether “the Decider” likes it or not. There were tens of thousands of Indians on hand in Delhi to protest the arrival of the man some referred to as “the world’s greatest terrorist,” and our beloved Arundhati Roy is all over the TV (even BBC World felt it necessary to cut her off repeatedly and change the subject when she made her case compellingly). Today, around 150,000 protested in Delhi, and i’ve been overhearing people criticizing Mr. Bush high and low in West Bengal and Sikkim as well. A dose of comic relief came today , however, when i read in the Kolkata paper that officials from the US Library of Congress attempted to buy some of the protesters’ signs and T-shirts for documentary purposes…

The talk of Dubya and selfishness led to a conversation about the role of educational institutions in preserving, creating, and shaping culture. I thought of the inspiring two-hour talk i heard the Dalai Lama give in Sarnath just a couple of weeks ago, addressing Tibetan and Indian academics, in which he called for a radical revision of the traditional monastic curriculum. It’s not enough to study the traditional Tibetan Buddhist canon, said the envelope-pushing reformer: monastic students must familiarize themselves with the entire body of Buddhist literature, from the Pali and Sanskrit texts to the Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, and other iterations… and, due to the irreversibly globalizing nature of the world of today, monks and nuns must also study at least the basics of the various spiritual traditions of the world as well as western philosophy, the natural sciences, computers, environmental issues, and social activism… and the monasteries, nunneries, and other Tibetan educational institutions must reinvent themselves to serve these updated objectives. If only the rest of the world’s spiritual leaders felt the same way… (Disclaimer: My Tibetan is rather shoddy, so i hope i’m conveying his message accurately enough. I did ask around to double-check, so i’m fairly confident in what i’ve written here, but in case of any errors, i apologize.)

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Interconnectedness vignette: I spent Losar (Tibetan New Year) afternoon at Pemayangtse Gompa (trans: Sublime Lotus Monastery), an 18th-century marvel of otherworldly art and architecture near the remote village of Pelling in West Sikkim. Most of the monks were knackered from two solid days of tantric cham dancing in heavy, hot, god-monster costumes, but when i leapt to help one still-effervescent lama move a butter-lamp table, i discovered he teaches about Buddhism in my alma mater’s Nepal program, which (unbeknownst to me until this moment) had transplanted itself from Nepal proper to Kalimpong a few years back when the so-called “Maoist” violence in Nepal escalated to a civil war. But the world wasn’t quite small enough yet. Standing behind me when i asked this lama how to find Zangdok Pelri, Guru Rinpoche‘s Copper-Colored Paradise, was a friendly South African computer programmer (the first Western face i’d seen in a couple of days) who, it turns out, used to take classes at the DrumCafé in Cape Town, which was founded by relatives of brother Guy Lieberman, who was the person through whom i originally met Leigh, who introduced us to Ani Sonam La… and he knew Guy’s uncle Steve Barnett, who had joined us for one of our programs in Dharamshala. Yep, that’s our global village. 🙂

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And so ends this visit to India. Whatever may come of the possibilities that have emerged, i’m immensely grateful for my time here. So many reminders of simple wisdom too easily forgotten when life speeds up… and some new learning that i can already feel doing its thing in me… opening, softening, humbling, strengthening, forging, inspiring…

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Being in India again is enough of a gift, but the unexpected bonus prize is a reunion with Nepal as well — not geographically this time, but culturally. This whole chunk of the Himalayas from Sikkim to the northern West Bengal hills (from the Bhutanese border in the east to the Nepali border in the west and the Tibetan border in the north) is predominantly Nepali, culturally and linguistically, with generous helpings of Tibetan, Indian, Bhutanese, and indigenous spices in the masala. A tasty mix, to my palate.

As we climbed higher into the foothills on the way to Kalimpong, we heard less Hindi and more Nepali, and i got to play in my favorite linguistic playground for the first time in seven or eight years. As some of you know, i find great joy in being the me that i become when i speak and think in Nepali (which i learned back in college during a life-changing semester in Nepal). It somehow feels like a more native tongue to me — a linguistic framework more readily conforming to the ways in which i experience the world and myself within it (whereas i often feel i’m “translating” when trying to express myself in English). So, all the more delightful it is that Ani Sonam La, our new old friend with whom Artyom and i spent three precious days last week, comes from a long line of Nepalis with broad minds and deep commitments to natural living and selfless service to their communities.

Ani Sonam La traveled several hours from her nunnery to meet us in Kalimpong. Physically tiny but energetically giant, and with a slightly weathered forty-something-ish face that could just as easily be Tibetan or Native American, she sailed down the hill to our lodge as if her nun’s robes were concealing the fact that she was gliding just above the ground rather than walking, and she lit up when i called her name. Instant friends — just add eye contact. We spent the four-hour jeep journey north toward her village yakking away about our dreams about H.H. the Dalai Lama, our visions for sustainable community, and our family legacies of service to society. Ani Sonam La was excited, she said, because it was clearly our good karma that brought us together to create this project to benefit the village and those who will come to meditate on this sacred land.

We reached the end of the “road” (using the term with maximum generosity here) after dark and walked the last hour through the forests and rice paddies to the home of her cousin, one Mr. S.N. Rai, who serves as the headmaster of their village primary school. A very thoughtful, gentle, and cheerful man, Mr. Rai, like many of his fellow villagers, is a devotee of Sai Baba (the world-famous afro-wallah guru whose motto is “love all, serve all”) and, as such, is exceptionally open-minded and more socially and environmentally conscious than your typical Indian or Nepali villager.

As we (Mr. Rai, Ani Sonam La, Artyom, and i) talked service, spirituality, politics, and sustainable development over dinner by lamplight, i was moved to tears as i listened to them and it struck me how similar we are — in some ways, more similar to each other than we are to the mainstreams of the societies from which we’ve emerged. It felt like the universe was doing some stellar matchmaking.

We slept in the guest room of Ani Sonam La’s parents’ home (a traditional two-story wood-and-adobe affair) and emerged in the morning to see the beauty of the village that we had only felt the previous night. We met her delightfully friendly parents and younger brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, and then joined Mr. Rai after breakfast to trek down to the school and then continue along the trail to meet the plot of land we’ve been offered.

The schoolhouse was built by the villagers in the early ’70s, with their own funds (the government promised school funding long ago, but… well, someone in a Kolkata office needed chai instead) and entropy has had its way with it since. One of our first projects will be to find a modest amount of financial support to enable to the villagers to do some basic renovation on the school for safety, and to build a fence around the courtyard to keep the kids from falling off the cliff when they play!

From the school, we wandered down a maze of trails, through rice paddies, forest, and cardamom plantations, to Pichung Lakha, the old name (which means something like “the seasonal encampment or resting place of Pichung,” though no one today knows what person or people were named Pichung) given to the hillside that hosts our date with destiny. Pichung Lakha is perfect.

The land (about half of which is visible in the photo, though it’s a bit larger than it looks here) stretches from the forest at the top (just beyond the right edge of the picture) down to the river below, which you might barely make out in the horizontal center photo, and includes a strip on the other side of the river. The land being offered to us includes terraces for growing food, caves and grottos which could easily be built into spots for long-term retreats, and several other flat spots suited to a dining pavilion/kitchen, dorm huts, a yoga pagoda, and a meditation hall/classroom.

Water is plentiful, for both cooking and farming, and there is no shortage of cash-poor locals who would benefit greatly from some paid work to construct the place (with their traditional, eco-friendly methods) and work with our international friends to create and maintain the gardens according to local, permaculture, and biointensive principles. In short, it’s everything we need for the humble first incarnation of the vision of a service-learning ashram and eco-retreat center.

Ani Sonam La wants to start by replanting the orange orchards that were there in her childhood and later clear cut to make space for rice paddies and terraces. Double-yum.

There are still many questions to be answered before we can be sure if this can happen here, but we’re off to a good start. We had left Sarnath with the Karmapa‘s blessings for the project, and we concluded our tour of Pichung Lakha with a puja (prayer and offering ceremony) at the Shiva cave down by the river for the removal of all obstacles and the success of the project… and the rest is just details. 😉

Seems i’ll be returning this summer to continue the conversation. For now, there’s plenty of visioning and homework to be done, and that too is a rewarding process.